London, 28 February 2022 — Oxford Quantum Circuits (OQC), Europe’s leading Quantum Computing as-a-Service company, announced today that it debuted its latest system, OQC Lucy, an 8-QPU quantum computer, on Amazon Braket.

With a new quantum processor from OQC, AWS is expanding Amazon Braket to support a new quantum hardware for the first time since Braket’s general availability in August 2020, expanding the service to the AWS Europe (London) Region, a significant milestone in providing customers access to a Europe-based quantum processor. 

Following OQC’s convention to name its quantum computers after ground-breaking women in STEM, OQC Lucy is named after Lucy Mensing, a German physicist and pioneer of quantum mechanics. OQC Lucy joins OQC Sophia, OQC’s system released in July to launch the company’s private Quantum Computing as-a-Service, another first in Europe.

New horizons for quantum in Europe

Located in the UK, OQC Lucy will provide Europe-friendly up-time and low-latency to customers in the region, offering higher serviceability with operations and support when they need it. 

The system’s location in Europe also provides advantages for data on- and near-shoring, a key concern for governmental agencies across Europe as well as large corporations with data residency and sovereignty requirements. These organisations now have access to a Europe-based quantum processor from OQC and through Amazon Braket.

Recently, OQC signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the UK’s National Quantum Computing Centre (NQCC) to boost quantum capability in the country. 

Less queuing, more uptime

Thanks to its unique 3D architecture, the Coaxmon, OQC is able to scale its systems rapidly without any compromise on performance. Its systems’ parameters remain the same even when a step change occurs in the number of qubits, guaranteeing customers always get the same performance or better. 

To constantly respond to customer needs OQC also integrates third party technology across its stack, offering world-class circuit optimisation. OQC’s compiler is designed to optimise the number of gates needed to execute a circuit, and initial tests have shown nearly 4X improvements for a ZX-calculus based circuit. These optimisations provide shallower circuits and more accurate results. 

Finally, with the recent launch of Amazon Braket Hybrid Jobs, a feature that simplifies the use quantum processors in tandem with classical processors in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) service, OQC is ideally positioned to help customers study the potential of hybrid quantum- classical algorithms. Thanks to priority access to the quantum processors for the duration of each hybrid job, OQC’s systems are hybrid workload-ready. Now, with these innovative capabilities, customers have the tools they need to explore the power of quantum computing whilst mitigating NISQ-era shortcomings.

QEDMA, a quantum computing software company, based in Israel, developing algorithms and software for quantum hardware developers and end users; and Quantum Computing Inc. (QCI), based in the United States, offering ready-to-run quantum software and services to solve complex optimisation computations, were the first to access Lucy, in private preview.